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Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

The last time I bought a MacBook was in 2016. I swear, that thing was cursed. In the first 2 weeks, I cracked the bezel below the screen (I suspect a small shell of a peanut or something of a similar nature). Then, 2 weeks after that, my keys started to randomly fall out (this was very common for that particular model) and Apple refused to fix it for me. And then, a few months down the line, I managed to spill a can of beer on it while getting up from the bed in my hotel room. That was the end of that.

Didn't get another one and instead got an Asus with an RTX card, which is really nice for all kinds of things, and even gaming when I want.

But, the M1 looks really promising. And it seems they have finally gotten rid of the Touch Bar also. I think I need to start putting some money in the piggy bank.

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It's been better written about elsewhere, but the fifth-gen 2021 M1 MBPs are a really good (if not timely) course correction from the fourth-gen (2016 - 2020) debacle. Solid keyboard, no useless touch bar, most all the ports back including MagSafe, top-notch display, and internal upgrades. I bought one to finally replace my 3rd gen (2013) MBP and it's just been fantastic.

I'm not sure how people have these structural issues with their Macbooks. Not saying you did anything wrong, but my experience with the screens is that they are relatively robust.

The only time I had a serious problem with Macs was back in the 2000's when they were shipping with cheap ass Hitachi hard drives that were extremely failure prone. I had an early iBook (yes the weird one with the translucent color) and one day the drive had an unrecoverable head collision and that was the end of that thing. Years later all my college friends had Macs and, no joke, half of them ended up with the same thing.

I got an M1 Macbook Air last year and I still feel like I'm living in the future. It's small, light, noiseless, and snappy to boot. The battery life is crazy good as well. I can take it on a plane and not even need to think about whether the plane has an outlet. As a web developer also doing SCAD for 3D printing, it's been a joy. It handles a bajillion browser tabs quite well. Maybe something else will fail after 7 years, but at least that will be 7 good years. lol

There's a lot to criticize about Apple as a company, but recently they've really been knocking it out of the park with their laptops in my opinion.

As an aside, if anyone reading this has an M1 or a Mac of any kind, at your own risk, look into disabling ReportCrash and see what happens. This improved performance even further for me, and it's easy to undo.

Macbooks are made of rigid aluminum and have incredibly tight tolerances especially in the 2016-2019 era. There is almost zilch room between the display and chassis when closed on butterfly models. Apple literally has a support article telling you not to use a webcam cover more than 0.1mm thick because you could break the display [0] and I've heard stories of similar problems with crumbs. They also had really poor cooling for the chips Apple stuffed in there especially for the i9s, to the point IIRC the 2018 i9 benchmarks slower than the i7 in longish workloads due to thermal throttling. And the butterfly keyboards are a known disaster prone to breaking.

While the M1 models have been an improvement, 2016-2019 were particularly not great.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT211148

Just so you know, rumors say M2 is around the corner, so you might save just enough to buy it when it comes out.

Or grab a refurbished M1 right after the M2 hits the street. That’s often been the sweet spot for Apple gear, and their refurbs are high quality.

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